'Supreme Court Opened Doors Of Accessibility For Persons With Disabilities' : Prof Amita Dhanda | Interview

In a significant ruling [Rajive Raturi v. Union of India 2024 LiveLaw (SC) 875] boosting disability rights, the Supreme Court on 8th November directed the Central Government to frame mandatory rules as required under Section 40 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPDA) for ensuring that public places and services accessible to persons with disabilities. The Court further held that Rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017 is ultra vires the parent Act, since it does not provide mandatory guidelines on accessibility. The judgment was passed in the light of the report titled 'Finding Sizes for All: A Report on the Right to Accessibility in India' submitted by Centre for Disability Studies, NALSAR University of Law (CDS), headed by Professor Amita Dhanda. Professor Amita Dhanda is the Head and Professor of the Centre for Disability Studies NALSAR. The report to the Supreme Court is the most recent foray of CDS into the realm of law reform. Earlier the Centre was legal consultant to the Joint Committee drafting the new law on disability rights to meet India's international obligations after the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereinafter UNCRPD) in October 2007. Professor Amita Dhanda, in conversation with Udit Singh, a doctoral fellow at NALSAR, on the intricacies of the above-mentioned study report and apprehensions with regard to Rajive Raturi's judgement. 1. What is the Rajive Raturi's case? And how did CDS get involved? Rajive Raturi was a case filed by a disability rights activist in 2005 under the Persons with Disabilities Act of 1995 to compel the government to fulfil its accessibility obligation under that statute especially for persons with visual impairments. The first major judgement in the case came from the bench of Justice Sikri and Justice Bhushan in 2017. This judgement acknowledged that the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 had enhanced the nature of the governments obligation in the matter. However, the 2017 case only focussed on the matter of retrofitting and how it was being undertaken and with what priority in different parts of the country. All the proceedings after 2017 revolved around the filing of compliance reports by the States and the Union. The States either failed to file or filed only incomplete compliance reports before the Court. In November 2023, both the Court and the petitioner felt frustrated with this state of affairs and it was decided to ask the Centre for Disability Studies (CDS) NALSAR to enquire into the matter and report what is the status of the right to accessibility in the country and why it is so? 2. What was the process followed by CDS in preparing the report and what were your major recommendations? The report has been put together by relying on both the versions of the States and the people. The States' version was obtained by writing to the Union, state governments, union territories generally and to the prisons more particularly. The status of access in courts was created by seeking information from the High Courts. The people's version was put together by conducting surveys on the impact of accessibility on the various rights guaranteed to persons with disabilities as also obtaining first-person accounts from persons with disabilities. In order to understand why the right to accessibility has not gained ground CDS interviewed acknowledged accessibility experts in the country. To obtain Accessibility, two kinds of steps were needed -one for fresh ventures and the other for retrofitting of the already existing built environment, transport, communication or services. The fresh ventures would need to be accessible for the entire country rural or urban, plains or hills across all facilities and for all persons with disabilities. The question of prioritization is of no relevance here. The second is the task of retrofitting which was accepted as staggered allowing for some prioritization. All the reports we received from 14 State Governments 3 Union Territories and the Union Government only restricted accessibility initiatives to retrofitting. There was no information provided on initiatives/ sanctions to ensure that fresh ventures would only be permitted if r they fulfilled Accessibility Rules. Our first major finding is that the two ventures of planning for the future and rectifying the past have been conflated and the Union and State Government are only concentrating on retrofitting. And the second is that the Rules do not specify when creating new facilities which standards if breached could result in the refusal of a completion certificate or the imposition of fines. This compulsion was required by the statute but the rules through which it was to be executed were not incorporated in the statute. We recommended that the Court should rectify this situation. 3. In your first reactions to the judgment, you have stated that with this...

'Supreme Court Opened Doors Of Accessibility For Persons With Disabilities' : Prof Amita Dhanda | Interview

Udit Singh

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